Lotus Consulting SA and IBM have been hard at work with Ithala Development Finance Corporation Limited (Ithala), formerly the Kwazulu Finance and Investment Corporation Limiteds (Ithala) implementation of the largest native Lotus Domino for AS/400 project of its kind in the southern hemisphere.
A need at Ithala arose for a reliable messaging and Web-enabled groupware and workflow application to streamline communications between its branches and departments and better monitor and manage its financial assets and investments. Ithala currently has 53 AS/400 servers installed throughout the KwaZulu-Natal region.
Ithala is actively involved in promoting socio-economic development of KwaZulu-Natal and its people through financing and investing in productive enterprises and projects in fields such as commerce, agriculture, finance, mining, industry and housing, says Dhiren Seeruttun, senior consultant and teamleader of the project at Lotus Consulting.
Due to continuous telephone cable theft and inaccessibility to remote sites, relying on WAN links to conduct business effectively was just not an option.
Thats where the strength of Lotus Domino with its replications technology becomes very useful to distribute and synchronise information to the local branches, says Seeruttun.
The Lotus Consulting team established Ithalas Lotus Policies, Standards, Procedures, and Guidebook (PSPG), which defines the Lotus Domino LAN and WAN topologies, the support model, the naming conventions, system management, backup and disaster recovery, etc. Only after the standards were defined, the actual implementation took place.
Other areas that were addressed in the venture, code-named Project One, included a Year 2000 project and JD Edwards implementation on AS/400.
With the messaging infrastructure now in place, Ithala has started to refine and streamline its workflow and business-critical applications by using Domino technology. Once such application being developed is a credit document and arrears management application for the housing loan division.
We plan to implement Lotus Domino on the other 53 servers as well, just as soon as the upgrade of the network infrastructures is completed, adds Seeruttun.
Share
Editorial contacts